Publications

Abstract

In this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammati-cal gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associ-ated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary consider-ably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of broad and contrastive focus in three language varieties of which two are in contact: bilingual Peruvian Spanish, Quechua and Peninsular Spanish. An interactive communicative task revealed that the prosodic marking of contrastive focus was limited in all three language varieties. No systematic correspondence was observed between specific contour/accent types and focus, and the phonetic marking of contrastive focus was weak and restricted to phrase-final position. Interestingly, we identified two contours for bilingual Peruvian Spanish that were present in Quechua, but not in Peninsular Spanish, providing evidence for a prosodic transfer from Quechua to Spanish in Quechua-Spanish bilinguals.

Abstract

Can studying left- and right-handers inform us about cognition? In this chapter, we give an overview of research showing that studying left- and right-handers is informative for understanding the way the brain is organized (i.e., lateralized), as there appear to be differences between left- and right-handers in this respect, but also on the behavioral level handedness studies can provide new insights. According to theories of embodied cognition, our body can influence cognition. Given that left- and right-handers use their bodies differently, this might reflect their performance on an array of cognitive tasks. Indeed, handedness can have an influence on, for instance, what side of space we judge as more positive, the way we gesture, how we remember things, and how we learn new words. Laterality research can, therefore, provide valuable information as to how we act and why

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work.

Abstract

The structural design features of human language emerge in the process of cultural evolution, shaping languages over the course of communication, learning, and transmission. What role does this leave biological evolution? This chapter highlights the biological bases and preconditions that underlie the particular type of prosocial behaviours and cognitive inference abilities that are required for languages to emerge via cultural evolution to begin with.

Abstract

This chapter describes topic management in the Papuan language Usan. The notion of ‘topic’ is defined by its pre-theoretical meaning ‘what someone’s speech is about’. This notion cannot be restricted to simple clausal or sentential constructions, but requires the wider context of long stretches of natural text. The tracking of a topic is examined in its relationship to clause combining mechanisms. Coordinating clause chaining with its switch reference mechanism is contrasted with subordinating strategies called ‘domain-creating’ constructions. These different strategies are identified by language-specific signals, such as intonation and morphosyntactic cues like nominalizations and scope of negation and other modalities.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that the evolution of language is affected by the inductive biases of its learners. I suggest that there is an implicit assumption that one of these biases is to expect a single linguistic system in the input. Given the prevalence of bilingual cultures, this may not be a valid abstraction. This is illustrated by demonstrating that the ‘minimal naming game’ model, in which a shared lexicon evolves in a population of agents, includes an implicit mutual exclusivity bias. Since recent research suggests that children raised in bilingual cultures do not exhibit mutual exclusivity, the individual learning algorithm of the agents is not as abstract as it appears to be. A modification of this model demonstrates that communicative success can be achieved without mutual exclusivity. It is concluded that complex cultural phenomena, such as bilingualism, do not necessarily result from complex individual learning mechanisms. Rather, the cultural process itself can bring about this complexity.

Abstract

Matsuzawa (2012) presented work at Evolang demonstrating the working memory abilities of chimpanzees. (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007) found that chimpanzees can correctly remember the location of 9 randomly arranged numerals displayed for 210ms - shorter than an average human eye saccade. Humans, however, perform poorly at this task. Matsuzawa suggests a semantic link hypothesis: while chimps have good visual, eidetic memory, humans are good at symbolic associations. The extra information in the semantic, linguistic links that humans possess increase the load on working memory and make this task difficult for them. We were interested to see if a wider search could find humans that matched the performance of the chimpanzees. We created an online version of the experiment and challenged people to play. We also attempted to run a non-semantic version of the task to see if this made the task easier. We found that, while humans can perform better than Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) suggest, chimpanzees can perform better still. We also found no evidence to support the semantic link hypothesis.

Abstract

In everyday joint activities (e.g. playing cards, preparing potatoes, collecting empty plates), participants often request others to pass, move or otherwise deploy objects. In order to get these objects to or from the requestee, requesters need to manipulate them, for example by holding them out, reaching for them, or placing them somewhere. As they perform these manual actions, requesters may or may not accompany them with language (e.g. Take this potato and cut it or Pass me your plate). This study shows that adding or omitting language in the design of a request is influenced in the first place by a criterion of recognition. When the requested action is projectable from the advancement of an activity, presenting a relevant object to the requestee is enough for them to understand what to do; when, on the other hand, the requested action is occasioned by a contingent development of the activity, requesters use language to specify what the requestee should do. This criterion operates alongside a perceptual criterion, to do with the affordances of the visual and auditory modality. When the requested action is projectable but the requestee is not visually attending to the requester’s manual behaviour, the requester can use just enough language to attract the requestee’s attention and secure immediate recipiency. This study contributes to a line of research concerned with the organisation of verbal and nonverbal resources for requesting. Focussing on situations in which language is not – or only minimally – used, it demonstrates the role played by visible bodily behaviour and by the structure of everyday activities in the formation and understanding of requests.

Abstract

Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year- olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both preposition al and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation –Welsh–to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-year-olds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.

Abstract

This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea used to construct their big seagoing masawa canoes and how they used to make their sails, what forms of different knowledge and expertise they needed to do this during various stages of the construction processes, how this knowledge was socially distributed, and the social implications of all the joint communal activities that were necessary until a new canoe could be launched. Then it tries to answer the question why the complex distributed knowledge of how to make a masawa has been gradually getting lost in most of the village communities on the Trobriand Islands; and finally it outlines and discusses the implications of this loss for the Trobriand Islanders' culture, for their social construction of reality, and for their indigenous cognitive capacities.

Abstract

This entry takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic pragmatics. It discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture-specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. The entry discusses core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary view of the field, showing that linguistic pragmatics has its predecessors in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, and sociology.

Abstract

This paper presents the complex system of classifiers in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. After a brief introduction to the language and its speakers, the classifier system is briefly described with respect to the role of these formatives for the word formation of Kilivila numerals, adjectives, demonstratives and one form of an interrogative pronoun/adverb. Then the functions the classifier system fulfils with respect to concord, temporary classification, the unitizing of nominal expressions, nominalization, indication of plural, anaphoric reference as well as text and discourse coherence are discussed and illustrated. The paper ends with some language specific and cross-linguistic questions for further research.

Abstract

Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of this formalism and present a formulator design which relies on it. Next, we present an object- oriented implementation of Segment Grammar. Finally, we compare Segment Grammar with other formalisms.

Abstract

Computational models can reflect the complexity of human behaviour by implementing multiple constraints within their architecture, and/or by taking into account the variety and richness of the environment to which the human is responding. We explore the second alternative in a model of word recognition that learns to map spoken words to visual and semantic representations of the words’ concepts. Critically, we employ a phonological representation utilising coarse-coding of the auditory stream, to mimic early stages of language development that are not dependent on individual phonemes to be isolated in the input, which may be a consequence of literacy development. The model was tested at different stages during training, and was able to simulate key behavioural features of word recognition in children: a developing effect of semantic information as a consequence of language learning, and a small but earlier effect of phonological information on word processing. We additionally tested the role of visual information in word processing, generating predictions for behavioural studies, showing that visual information could have a larger effect than semantics on children’s performance, but that again this affects recognition later in word processing than phonological information. The model also provides further predictions for performance of a mature word recognition system in the absence of fine-coding of phonology, such as in adults who have low literacy skills. The model demonstrated that such phonological effects may be reduced but are still evident even when multiple distractors from various modalities are present in the listener’s environment. The model demonstrates that complexity in word recognition can emerge from a simple associative system responding to the interactions between multiple sources of information in the language learner’s environment.

Abstract

Multimodal integration is a central characteristic of human cognition. However our understanding of the interaction between modalities and its influence on behaviour is still in its infancy. This paper examines the value of the Hub & Spoke framework (Plaut, 2002; Rogers et al., 2004; Dilkina et al., 2008; 2010) as a tool for exploring multimodal interaction in cognition. We present a Hub and Spoke model of language–vision information interaction and report the model’s ability to replicate a range of phonological, visual and semantic similarity word-level effects reported in the Visual World Paradigm (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus et al, 1995). The model provides an explicit connection between the percepts of language and the distribution of eye gaze and demonstrates the scope of the Hub-and-Spoke architectural framework by modelling new aspects of multimodal cognition.

Abstract

Previous studies show that children do not become adult-like in learning to set the scene and introduce referents in their narrations until 9 years of age and even beyond. However, they investigated spoken languages, thus we do not know much about how these skills are acquired in sign languages, where events are expressed in visually similar ways to the real world events, unlike in spoken languages. The results of the current study demonstrate that deaf children (3;5–9;10 years) acquiring Turkish Sign Language, and hearing children (3;8–9;11 years) acquiring spoken Turkish both acquire scene-setting and referent introduction skills at similar ages. Thus the modality of the language being acquired does not have facilitating or hindering effects in the development of these skills.

Abstract

We investigate how the lexical nature of weak definites influences the phenomenon of direct object scrambling in Dutch. Earlier experiments have indicated that weak definites are more resistant to scrambling than strong definites. We examine how the notion of weak definiteness used in this experimental work can be reduced to lexical connectedness. We explore four different ways of quantifying the relation between a direct object and the verb. Our results show that predictability of a verb given the object (verb cloze probability) provides the best fit to the weak/strong distinction used in the earlier experiments

Abstract

Left dislocation is characterized by a sentence-initial element which is crossreferenced in the remainder of the sentence, and often set off by an intonation break. Because of these properties, left dislocation has been analyzed as an extraclausal phenomenon. Whether or not left dislocation can occur within subordinate clauses has been a matter of debate in the literature, but has never been checked against corpus data. This paper presents data from Avatime, a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Ghana, showing that left dislocation occurs within subordinate clauses in spontaneous discourse. This poses a problem for the extraclausal analysis of left dislocation. I show that this problem can best be solved by assuming that Avatime allows the embedding of units larger than a clause

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the repercussions of a conceptual orientation on two crucial parts of the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) linking algorithm, that is, semantic representation and constructional schemas. Firstly, it is argued that adopting FunGramKB’s notion of conceptual logical structure (CLS) over standard RRG logical structures (LSs) has numerous advantages since meaning has now access to conceptual knowledge and therefore a CLS provides a format that goes beyond those aspects that are syntactically visible. The second part introduces the notion of the grammaticon, the component where constructional schemas actually reside. RRG constructional schemas are analyzed within a conceptual framework like that provided in FunGramKB. In essence, it is shown that a conceptual orientation to the RRG linking system by the addition of CLSs enriches the semantic representations in it substantially

Abstract

The term “event” is a controversial concept, and the “same” activity or situation can be linguistically encoded in many different ways. The aim of this task is to explore features of event representation in the language of study, in particular, multi-verb constructions, event typicality, and event complexity. The task consists of a description and recollection task using film stimuli, and a subsequent re-enactment of certain scenes by other participants on the basis of these descriptions. The first part of the task collects elaborate and concise descriptions of complex events in order to examine how these are segmented into macro-events, what kind of information is expressed, and how the information is ordered. The re-enactment task is designed to examine what features of the scenes are stereotypically implied.

Abstract

Language- and speech-related disorders are among the most frequent consequences of developmental and acquired pathologies. While classical approaches to the study of these disorders typically employed the lesion method to unveil one-to-one correspondence between locations, the extent of the brain damage, and corresponding symptoms, recent advances advocate the use of online methods of investigation. For example, the use of electrophysiology or magnetoencephalography—especially when combined with anatomical measures—allows for in vivo tracking of real-time language and speech events, and thus represents a particularly promising venue for future research targeting rehabilitative interventions. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of language and speech pathologies arising from cortical and/or subcortical damage, and their corresponding neurophysiological and pathological symptoms. Building upon the reviewed evidence and literature, we aim at providing a description of how the neurophysiology of the language network changes as a result of brain damage. We will conclude by summarizing the evidence presented in this chapter, while suggesting directions for future research.